It is well known to use sensors to monitor the environmental conditions in clean rooms that are used to make, for example, semiconductor devices. Numerous environmental conditions must be maintained, and therefore monitored, to ensure certain clean room specifications are met. Examples of such environmental conditions include temperature, relative humidity, air velocity, differential pressure between clean room areas, airborne particle counts, etc.
Clean room environmental sensors serve several purposes: to create a record of the clean room conditions, to sound an alarm should any environmental parameter fall outside a specified range, and to provide feedback for the systems used to maintain the desired clean room conditions. Typically, a large number of such sensors are used in any given clean room environment, especially if a dozen or more sensors are used to monitor mini-environments at various locations within the clean room. Each such sensor requires it own power source, user interface, and separately configured control device that determines and allows the user to adjust the sensor's operating parameters (e.g. output range scale, set points, calibration, sampling interval, high/low alarm limits, etc.). Thus, installation, configuration and operation of multiple sensor systems can be complicated, time consuming, expensive and redundant.
There is a need for a centralized environmental monitor system that is compatible with and can automatically configure and control a number of sensors and sensor types.